Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is right:
the decision in Gonzales v. Carhart,which upheld a statutory ban on partial-birth
abortions, “dishonors our precedent.” That makes her apoplectic, even though
she recognizes the ban “saves not a single fetus from destruction.” Carhart,
she says, is “alarming,” it “cannot be understood as anything other than an
effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court,” a
woman’s right to an abortion. Hopefully, she is right on that also. Only time
will tell whether Carhart began the undermining of Roe v. Wade or
whether it is instead an aberration.

The five Catholic Justices constituted the majority
in Carhart, with Justice Anthony Kennedy authoring the opinion of the
Court. Justice Ginsburg, a Jew, wrote the dissent, in which all of the other
non-Catholic members of the Court joined. The two opinions reflect widely
disparate views on woman as mother. When Justice Kennedy invokes “the bond of
love the mother has for her child” as an “ultimate expression” of “the respect
for human life,” Justice Ginsburg carps that “this way of thinking reflects
ancient notions of women’s place in the family … – ideas that have long since
been discredited.” She even gripes that in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion
“a fetus is described as an ‘unborn child,’ and as a ‘baby.’”

Now, the bond of love of a mother for her child is
surely an ancient concept. That bond is rooted in nature, and it has never been
and cannot be discredited. Despite the efforts of fanatics such as Rousseau and
communists, it has persisted over the centuries and across cultures. And it
will persist despite the efforts of feminists such as Justice Ginsburg, an abortion
zealot who formerly litigated for the ACLU’s women’s rights project.

That bond of love exists in its most sublime form
between Christ and His mother, a relationship most honored within the Catholic
tradition. Artistic representations of the Madonna and Child attempt to portray
that bond and enjoy a revered position in Catholic iconography. When Justice
Ginsburg belittles the belief that “the paramount destiny and mission of women
are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” she strikes at
the Blessed Virgin, the inherent dignity of woman, the proper relationships
between husband and wife, the proper relationship between mother and child, and
Catholicism’s teaching on the family. If the family is truly the domestic
church, Justice Ginsburg is out to destroy that church.

That destruction, she implies, is mandated by the
Constitution – or at least by opinions of the Supreme Court that apply,
interpret, and often torture the provisions of the Constitution.Women should no longer be “regarded as
the center of home and family life,” she says, quoting from an earlier Supreme
Court decision on abortion. The Court’s opinions, she insists, require a focus
only on the woman who wants an abortion, not on the mother-child relationship
or the family. “Thus,” she writes, “legal challenges to undue restrictions on
abortion procedures … center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s
course.”

The Carhart majority, Justice Ginsburg points
out, “admits that ‘moral concerns’ are at work” in its justification of the ban
on partial-birth abortion, and this makes her bitter.“By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case,
overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent.” She then
cites earlier Supreme Court decisions endorsing abortion and sodomy as
establishing that the state cannot legislate morality, the view she expounds.
Her stated preference for “autonomy,” not morality, though, is actually an
endorsement of immorality or amorality.

“One wonders how long a line that saves no fetus from
destruction will hold in face of the Court’s ‘moral concerns,’” she writes,
because the “Court’s hostility to the right Roe and Casey secured
is not concealed.” It’s a good question, but the threat to the continued
vitality of those abortion cases is not as real as she intimates. The five
Catholic Justices cannot be counted on to vote as a bloc to overturn Roe v.
Wade. Indeed, it would be quite surprising if they did. And it is highly
unlikely that Justice Ginsburg or her cohorts in dissent in Carhart will
suddenly abandon the Court-created right to abort.

Justice Ginsburg’s words and views are those of a
shrew capable of much evil. And, by and large, that evil remains the law of the
land. In appearance, she resembles The
Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, a resemblance that seems
especially apt, for, as G.K. Chesterton observed in The Everlasting Man, “people would understand better the popular
fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly
attributed to them was preventing births.”

Speed Bump, an e-book by James G. Bruen, Jr.
Five flash fiction stories, published originally in the American Chesterton Society's Gilbert Magazine. Each stands alone; together they also constitute a single narrative. Speed Bump is a story of neighborhood, solidarity, and struggle against oppressive government; inspired by G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill and his The Man Who Knew Too Much. $2.99. Read
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